Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit is taking over Google

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 349 posts

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#161

Post by ryandrake »

adamomada wrote: post #66
buffet_overflow wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to see two types of upvotes on the site. One for “thanks for answering/engaging” and another for “this answer is correct and high quality”. Not sure how you’d restrict or verify the votes, but I think the issue you’re pointing out is a result of only having one metric of engagement.

Slashdot solved it more than twenty years ago.

Slashdot also had the concept of meta-moderation, where the site's users could vote on whether a particular mod's actions were appropriate/fair or not. Presumably mods that were voted as problematic stopped getting the ability to mod.

Slashdot was in many ways way ahead of their time. I think Reddit (and even HN) could benefit from this kind of check/balance.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#162

Post by the_real_cher »

jedberg wrote: post #29

To this day, my most public contribution to reddit is that I wrote the code to put the title of the post in the URL. That was done specifically for SEO purposes. It was pretty much the only SEO optimization we ever did (along with a few DOM changes), because shortly after that, Google basically dedicated engineering effort specifically to crawling reddit. So much so that we lost the "crawl rate" button in our SEO adm…

Do you use the new design or stick with old.reddit.com?

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#163

Post by nitwit005 »

mark242 wrote: post #120
jedberg wrote: post #29

To this day, my most public contribution to reddit is that I wrote the code to put the title of the post in the URL. That was done specifically for SEO purposes. It was pretty much the only SEO optimization we ever did (along with a few DOM changes), because shortly after that, Google basically dedicated engineering effort specifically to crawling reddit. So much so that we lost the "crawl rate" button in our SEO adm…

It's mind-boggling to me that Google didn't create a spec to work with special partners whereby they could get syndicated data in a format that was easy to ingest, and easy for their partners to produce. Lighting dollars on fire just to serve up pages to Googlebot, when you could just periodically dump a journal of updates to Google, is just crazy imo. On edit: if only there were some way to do some kind of really si…

In the past Google just requested the HTML, and didn't bother with the javascript, so it was a simple document request.

People started serving up pages that required Javascript to show content, so they had cope with that. I'm sure it's dramatically more expensive for them as well.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#165

Post by pyb »

xcrunner529 wrote: post #13
chomp wrote: post #8

> Responding to a post on X, Google search liaison Danny Sullivan said users not only like seeing "forum content" but that they "proactively seek it out." Nothing cures my imposter syndrome more than seeing so many Google employees completely fail to understand what is happening here. People aren’t tacking Reddit to queries because they particularly like Reddit or because they want to see user generated content, it’s…

Yep. Google is mostly useless these days aside from a Reddit search because everything is fake.

Not, it's because Google is promoting fake stuff.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#167

Post by pixl97 »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #151
pixl97 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, yes and no. At the same time there are power hungry mods, there are limitless hordes of complete asshole users that are only there to cause problems and not engage in legitimate debate. Forums really kind of suck once they get over particular sizes and never ending battles erupt.

>there are limitless hordes of complete asshole users that are only there to cause problems and not engage in legitimate debate Isn't that what downvotes are for?

You're like 20 years behind on forum manipulation if you think so...

So, if the admins of the site to a really good job of banning accounts that exist for the purpose of vote manipulation, then voting works ok. If not the votes that generally dictate how well a post/topic does occur within the first few minutes of posting.

Post topic -> Upvote -> Post conformation messages of approval of the topic -> bots upvote these posts -> bots downvote anyone that disagree.

Moreso, downvotes themselves don't directly address things like raids and sustained attacks by bad actors. These kinds of attacks make the end user feel like they don't want to be in that subforum driving them off elsewhere and lowering participation. It can also embolden others to post more similar content to what the bots are posting.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#168

Post by TulliusCicero »

tayo42 wrote: post #92
TulliusCicero wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say mods are a little to heavy handed. Some mods are, but the only reason people really think this is because the heavy-handed aspects are the visible ones. Nobody really sees mods removing random spam threads and comments, that's the whole point. Good modding is mostly invisible.

Maybe, I think it seems like that. I felt similar until I had some posts moderated away or banned, which made me realize there is probably a lot more of those going on then I realized. There isn't a big notification when things get removed. There is also trying to post and dealing with automoderator. There's subreddits I don't read or participate in anymore becasue of how annoying it is to get a post through. I get t…

You cannot, in fact, rely on the community users more. It does not scale.

You'll see situations where most people are nominally opposed to low-effort memes while everyone upvotes the low-effort memes, and then people complain that there are too many low-effort memes cluttering the front page and now the sub is trash and they're leaving.

edit: though honestly I don't think volunteer mods scale well either. A tiny niche sub can get by with just a couple mods just fine, but when they get 100x as popular, can they then have 200 mods? Or have 2000 mods for the most popular subs? No, there's just no way to coordinate that many volunteers sensibly, not in an environment like Reddit.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#169

Post by TulliusCicero »

pixl97 wrote: post #98
TulliusCicero wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say things like this, but the subs I frequent largely seem fine. I'm sure there are bad actors somewhere in there, but they don't seem prominent to me. > every single parenting/mom sub is inundated by formula companies. Okay, if it's every single one, show me all the formula company inundation in r/daddit. Should be easy if they're absolutely everywhere, like you say, right?

Look for reposts of the same topics and comments. Quite often the bots just look like contributors until you realize they've never had an original comment in their posting history. More often it seems they are involved in creating consensus and nudging votes up and down and in general making it more painful karma wise for those that don't toe the line. Not a daddit visitor, but it appears that formula is an uncommon…

Okay, that poster making the claim was completely wrong then. Almost like they pulled their claim entirely out of their ass.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#170

Post by TulliusCicero »

owlninja wrote: post #118
xboxnolifes wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is saying bot/shill accounts don't exist. Just that they aren't literally everywhere and in insane numbers . Also, it's about the distribution of the bots between the subs: are they mostly on the huge main subs, or do they also expand to the 10,000 person niche subs? If 1 formula company has 1 reddit bot that posts 1 post every month in every parenting subreddit, is that considered a bot infestation? How many…

Thank you, this is what I meant. I am well aware they exist but anytime I mention maybe I use reddit to do research before a purchase - everyone acts like not a single human even exists on there.

If there's a better source for general purpose product recommendations than Reddit, I haven't found it.

I'd say the only real weakness is that sometimes the recommendations lean too hard on being for enthusiasts, and don't always fit what a casual user of a thing cares about. But other than that they're pretty great.

Post reply on HN